Why Choose Ownership Over Being a CEO

And some of our best travelers take an average of three trips a year. And so that loyalty made me also feel incredibly confident in the brand. She was doing something really well and had been for a long time.

The business, she'd founded it in 2014, and it hadn't really taken off until 2022, when the travel industry obviously had a huge boom after Covid. But she had a lot of loyalty. She also had a very interesting model where the people who were hosting these trips were not her.

Most of them are retired. And they said, hey, what if I hosted a trip for you? And they get, you know, a free trip and a free travel experience out of it and they get to be the host, sort of the person making sure that everyone feels included, making sure that the dinners are going well.

They're not responsible for the guided tour aspect of the trip, but they're just responsible for making sure that the everyone is happy and content on the trip and, you know, being that person that can report back to the back office as well and say, hey, you know, we had an issue with this vendor today, or I have a question about the itinerary tomorrow. So there are on the ground liaison.

And because she had a roster of 12 of those women who were doing great jobs and were really trusted and very invested in the brand, I also felt Very confident about the, the business being able to transfer away from the owner and not losing a whole bunch of clients because they were sad that Caramel wasn't there anymore. More.

Yeah. Yep. The size of the business, talk to me about that. That's. It's a small business. Yeah, Great margins, but it's quite on the, it's quite on the small side.

So we actually, like I said, we had three deals under LOI and we had raised enough capital to be able to acquire all three of them. And one of them we said no to after the LOI pretty quickly because their, their books were a mess. And I just, we couldn't get comfortable with the numbers.

But we got to the APA stage with two deals and we actually had enough equity that we'd raised both personal equity as well as some outside investors. We own 60, a little over 65% of the business and then outside investors own 35% and we raised enough to be able to do two all equity deals. We weren't going to be raising any debt and so that made us very comfortable with the smaller business size.

I think that if you had to layer on an SBA or you had to layer on a lot of debt, I might have been a little bit more concerned. But also we thought we were going to be buying two and combining them and having, you know, a $400,000 business instead of a, you know, 280,000 SD business when we bought it. So that was part of the thinking as well, was that, oh, hey, we're buying two businesses…

We ended up only buying Women Travel Abroad largely because the other deal I had some red flags with the seller and their willingness to actually step away from the business. They still wanted to be in the travel industry, albeit in a slightly different way. But I was a little worried about them actually following through with the non compete and with all of the things that are very important…

So I ended up passing on that deal before we signed the APA and we only purchased Women Travel Abroad but now have a bunch of capital on the balance sheet to do a second deal. And again there's the organic growth piece which we've succeeded at, but there's also inorganic growth which will help us more quickly grow this business to be a size that's more typical for a search business.